[Solar-talk] Solar Testing via external test library

[Travis Swicegood]

Hello all,

Sorry this thread got dropped, but other code got in the way. The rest 
of the email continues below...


Clay Loveless wrote:
> On Oct 4, 2006, at 9:09 AM, Paul M Jones wrote:
>
>   
>> Sounds OK to me, if we can get a guru to convert the existing tests
>> then that's fine.  (Would be good to target PhpUnit3, I think, seeing
>> as it's PHP5 and fully name-spaced, but arguments in favor of
>> SimpleTest happily accepted.)
>>     
>
> Interesting, interesting.
>
> Some good points about depending on oneself to test oneself --  
> probably best to have an external entity for testing.
>
> While I like some things about SimpleTest as well, I think today's  
> announcement of PHPUnit3's support for Selenium makes it a very, very  
> strong contender for the preferred testing framework.
>   

I've played with PHPUnit3 a bit this morning and even wrote some basic 
tests for Solar::loadClass() and Solar::factory() for it. I have a few 
issues with it that I thought I'd bring up to the list and see what 
other's thought.

* No easy way to change output from text via CLI to any other format

SimpleTest employs reporters to allow you to create your own output. By 
default it comes with Text, HTML, XML, and a ColorText for CLI use. 
Everything but the XML output is just a nicety, but the XML can be used 
to aggregate tests from multiple servers and run their results back 
through your unified tester

* No expectations (i.e., expectError())

The function file_exists() does not scan the include_path for a file. To 
do an environment check and make sure Solar.php is availalbe, you need 
to do an include('Solar.php') and insure that no errors were generated. 
With PHPUnit3, I'm not seeing a way to make that happen.


There are two big pluses that have been brought up - the Selenium 
support and the fact that it's PEAR.

1. Selenium support would not be that hard to add to SimpleTest. 
Actually, the class that PHPUnit3 uses could be used with just a handful 
of lines of code modified.

2. PHPUnit3 being part of PEAR and used by most tested PEAR packages is 
not something I can disagree with. The one thing I can bring up is that 
unit test suites all carry similar enough languages that if you're not 
having to worry about setup and you're just reading the test cases, you 
can read through any of them in any language easily.


Any thoughts, ideas? In the mean time, I'm going to float the idea of 
adding a Selenium extension to SimpleTest on the ST dev mailing list and 
see what the response there is.

-Travis